Photo sharing website Flickr has been given a massive makeover under Yahoo! CEO Marissa Meyer's stewardship.

Flickr now gives all free user accounts one terabyte of free storage. Yahoo! says that if you took a photo every day, it would take 61.5 years to fill a terabyte.

This is sounds like an outrageous amount to give for free but there's a reason for this. Flickr wants users to post the high resolution and full-sized versions of their photos online which are larger files that take on more space.

Flickr was the photo sharing website of choice a few years ago. That was before mobile apps became prevalent and before photo sharing app Instagram became a sensation. Instagram got so huge so fast that Facebook bought it for a cool $1 billion. It seems that users quickly lost interest in Flickr which still has 89 million users.

Yahoo! has been on a resurgence. They recently bought blogging powerhouse Tumblr and then relaunched the new and improved Flickr. As a Flickr user since 2006, I was intrigued to see what the service had to offer.

The focus on pictures and quality is reflected in their new layout which has very little white space and really puts images front and centre.

Flickr has also decided to push for a partner-centric philosophy so images can be viewed and shared across any screen or any social network. Sharing images has been made easier than ever.

The accompanying smartphone apps, are dynamic, easy to use and just as useful as the website. But is it good enough to take back users from Instagram?

"I think Flickr is awesome again," Yahoo's Mayer said during the service's unveiling. "Photos make the world go 'round, Flickr was awesome once, then it languished. And now again it is."

The advantage of the new Flickr over Instagram is that now users can share their photos just as easily, but in high resolution, and without the need to crop their images to fit the limited screen size of a smartphone.

Instagram trumps most photo sharing services because of the speed and ease of use to share images plus the number of built-in filters that give photos character. The limitation is that users need to crop photos to fit the program.

Choose any Flickr image and you now have the option to view in in full resolution against a dark background which helps keep the focus on the photo.

You can now share photos not just via e-mail or as a link but a quick menu quickly reveals links to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Pinterest. This also works on the mobile apps which are similarly designed for quick and easy sharing.

I personally gave up on Flickr after years of having a paid Pro account because fewer and fewer people were using it plus I found it tedious to work with the old design. I did upload 6,239 photos through the years under various photosets and it is great that I get all of them back for free.

While I don't think I'll get to fill even a fraction of the one terabyte of free storage, I am now more inclined to save and share my photos on their new service. Instagram is still the best way to share quick snapshots but it looks like Flickr is defining its own space in the photo sharing space.

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